The data bellow shows the time (in seconds) for different runs for different values of ObjectCount (in the same machine with approximately the same load) as well as it’s availability for different version of the .NET Framework and the C# programming language:

The previous expression gets the value of a property of the conversion of the parameter of type object to the type of the object. The result must also be converted to type object because the type of the result must match the type of the return value of the expression.

For the same type of objects, the collection of property accessors would be built this way:

In a previous post, I went through how arrays have are covariant in relation to the type of its elements, but not safely covariant.

In the following example, the second assignment is invalid at run time because, although the type of the objectArray variable is array of object, the real type of the array is array of string and an object cannot be assigned to a string.

The fact that all elements in the object array are strings doesn’t make it convertible to an array of string. To convert this object array of strings into a string array, you’ll need to create a new string array and copy each converted element.

The conversion can be as easily as this:

string[] stringArray = objectArray.Cast<string>().ToArray();

The above code is just shorthand to traversing the whole array while converting its elements to string and creating an string array with all elements.

Arrays are a good storage structure because they are the only structure provided by the runtime to store groups of items of the same type. However, because of limitations like the above, its use in APIs should be very carefully considered.

If all you need is to traverse all elements of some collection, you should use an IEnumerable<T> (IEnumerable<out T> in .NET 4.0). This way, the cost of using Enumerable.Cast<T>() is minimal.